AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, has raised $155 million in Series C funding from several investors, including tech giants Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL, GOOG) and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). AI21 Labs, which competes with the likes of ChatGPT creator OpenAI and San Francisco-based Anthropic, said that the latest round of funding brings the total capital raised to $283 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion.
AI21 Labs Gets Funding to Drive AI Ambitionssha
AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 by Professor Amnon Shashua, Professor Yoav Shoham, and Ori Goshen. Shashua is the founder and CEO of Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)-owned Mobileye (NASDAQ:MBLY). With the help of its advanced large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, AI21 serves customers through easy-to-use applications and application programming interfaces (APIs). The company claims that its proprietary Jurassic-2 foundation models are some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated LLMs.
The company expects the latest round of funding to accelerate the growth of its “highly accurate” text-based generative AI services for enterprises. Aside from Alphabet and Nvidia, other investors include Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next, and Shashua.
Commenting about the AI start-up, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, “The innovative work by the AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI-based systems that are accurate, trustworthy, and reliable.”
As per AI21, it is collaborating with market-leading customers in various sectors for generative AI applications. The company’s clientele includes Carrefour, Clarivate (NYSE:CLVT), eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), Guesty, Monday.com (NASDAQ:MNDY), and Ubisoft (FR:UBI).
Growing Investments in AI Start-Ups
The massive success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has triggered phenomenal interest in generative AI applications, resulting in significant investments by cash-rich big tech companies. Earlier this year, tech behemoth Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) said it is making a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, following previous investments in 2019 and 2021.
Recently, Anthropic announced that it has raised $100 million from South Korean telco behemoth SK Telecom. Previously, Anthropic raised $450 million in a funding round that involved Spark Capital, Alphabet, Salesforce Ventures (the venture capital arm of Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), and others.
Additionally, on early Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Canadian AI startup Cohere, which is backed by investors like Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) and Nvidia, is in talks with banks to raise a fresh round of financing. Cohere raised $270 million in June at a valuation of about $2.2 billion.
